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Fidel is dead; his year of birth is a rhyming 

one—the year of Elizabeth II’s birth, 

the year my father was born in Warri. 

Who remembers the names of the women 

perched between thighs to enact the ordinary 

You will remember that last meeting before her death. 

That November Jamaica had lost its petulance. The season of sorrel, 

rum and bloody poinsettias was gathering strength; and in that hiatus, 

You’re quiet today, Daddy, 

none of your usual defenses 

I could repeat word for word;

nor your lengthy sermons eclipsing 

all my efforts at some kind 

of closeness. 

We’ve been travelling wordlessly

This room should be called “enough” 

with its sound of arrival, its fixed white sheets

like a new beginning. I have left 

my shoes at the door with their dust 

of other things and places, I have hung 

The man of your dreams has left the dream, 

and left you so softly-stranded — he has risen 

from the bed whose far corners you had stretched yourself 

to, like a flat world whose ends you would go to with him, 

For Louise             

You left in your time

it is enough, you said, it is enough.

You let go, of the sucking-long-heave to breathe

of bones, muscles-loose in hanging skin heavy

river water is clear so

      stones flush from downhill rush in rainy season

            glitter & how it bubble, 

“Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,..” (Derek Walcott)

1.

filthy feathers, that painted shoe, trampled headpiece, etcetera

choking drains down the route,

street-light blinking out, stale roti

Mornin-mornin. How yuh do?

Now is good time for a little reasonin, 

when day jus’ beginin. Too besides is Sunday. 

No rushin. Even God take day-off. Watch— 

grass shinin, beach wash clean, an listen, 

As a child, watching my mother cool the hot tea by pouring it 

from one cup into another, then from the filled cup back 

into the emptied one, and then again         again,

the afternoon-or-evening-coloured liquid unfurling downward 

I 

If I had thought you would have gone so imperceptibly

so almost-without-my-knowing

I might have listened to your fluted love, the touterelles

      in the orange grove, more intently

I

Si mwen té kwè ou té kai alé si tèlman san pèsèpsyon mwen 

si tèlman san konnésans mwen

mwen pitèt té pé kouté lanmou-ou, an lanmou kon mizik an flit

      kon chason lé toutwèl adan

In the devant-jour quiet, before the sun comes over

the shoulder of the world

there is no prayer; I gave up the going down on knees

in the morning of a world in flower;

when a thousand flowers dared to blossom, and somewhere

in a field of disparate ideas

He grew the biggest pears in Buhbayduss. Full-bodied 

affairs that everyone kept watch on 

each season, calculating pale-yellow prize 

in the purse or on the tongue. 

This redbrick man with a mean streak 

(A Bridgetown poem)

​​​​​​​

When the sun’s
no longer a wrecking crew,

when he’s wielding microscope

and precision tools, and presents

himself as an altogether different

class of brute

meet me

on the bridge.

Dedicated to the service men, foundry men, labourers, farm hands, nurses: those Windrush generation giants.

1948 (i)

them big small-island people

congregating like hope

on a Sunday morning

them same one

Pan
god of the reeds by the river
god of all music, god of all sound
wind whistling through leaves
wind wailing casuarinas bending…

As Derek Walcott famously reminded us, the Caribbean has never primarily been noted for great monuments or magnificent ruins.

After slavery done, and after
the last bonfires had burned out
they looked around to realize
all the good land had gone
long time into backra massa
hand. They walked for miles
along the stone walls they
themselves had made and mended,
and not one deggeh square

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